Hannah takes the cell and turns it over in her hands, as if testing its weight. Then flips it open cautiously. The finish is worn off the frame, the numbers rubbed off the keypad. “Okay,” Hannah says, and returns it to her. “I think analog is safe.”
The caller ID reads 503—Portland—but it’s not a number Lela recognizes. She thumbs the button and accepts the call and slowly brings the phone to her ear. “Who is this?”
“Thank god you’re a Luddite.” It’s Josh, the intern, speaking in a panicked blur, each word crashing into the next. “Thank god you have that stupid Flintstone phone.”
“I tried you earlier. Where are you?”
“I can’t use my cell. I’m afraid to use it. I’m calling on a landline. Whatever you do, don’t get online right now. There’s a virus that—”
“We know.”
“Whatever you think you know, you don’t. You don’t know how bad it really is. Now listen to me very carefully. This whole story just broke wide open.”
Chapter 25
THE AVERAGE PERSON checks their phone eighty-five times a day. Given that we’re asleep for probably half of that time, the math works out to eight times an hour. And that’s just phones. How often does a face turn toward a television, a tablet, a laptop, a screen? It’s night, so fewer people should be online, but it’s Halloween night, so more than usual. How many are infected, whether hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands, Josh doesn’t know. Nor does he know exactly how the contagion works. But he tries to explain it as best he can.
Not long ago scientists figured out a way to create mathematical constructs of patients’ hearts. They can do things to these digital hearts, safely experiment, make guesses. Subtract something here, add something there, rearrange, rip, gouge, patch, stint. And based on this model—this complicated equation—they can figure out, perfectly, what will happen to the actual organ during a planned procedure. These scientists now hope to map out bodies, individual bodies, in the same way. So that you would be coded. Meaning a doctor could find or resolve—or even worsen—a problem in you by shifting some numbers around. That’s essentially what’s happening now, Josh says. A code is worsening us.
Everyone is code. Everything is code. You dial a number on your phone. That is code. You scratch down a grocery list. That is code. You play a folk song that makes someone mellow and happy. Or write a memo that gets someone fired. You put on a business suit because you want authority, and you put on a negligee because you want to be unwrapped. Those are code too. This is code, this conversation between Josh and Lela. A collection of sounds and signals that serves a function—to educate, to warn, to incite action.
If you eat something, your body will absorb the food, break it down into particles that will nourish or infect you. You will be altered, even if only in a small way. You might become ill. Information is the same. Opening your eye is like opening your mouth. Calling it a Twitter feed feels so apt. People are being fed intelligence now. Spoonfuls of ones and zeroes that are dissolving into them this very second, sparking neurons, creating a fresh pink wrinkle in their brains.
People fuss so much about what they eat. BPA this, GMO that. Trans fat. Simple sugars. Dyes, additives. But they don’t worry as much about what they consume online. The people who are infected, their hard drives and their minds are now hosting something invisible, unwanted. Their bodies are presently processing it. You can think of this as a virus or as a spell, an incantation, a collection of ciphers, a protest song that brings about change.
“A possession,” Lela says to him, this time with more confidence.
“A possession,” Josh says. “Exactly. They’re possessed. This city is possessed.”
He describes what he has seen firsthand and what he has gleaned from the scanner. The bodies, the fires, the bullets, the knives. “Don’t go outside. Don’t go online.”
“This isn’t just going away.”
“No, it’s not,” he says. “This is the battle that starts the war.”
“We need to do something.”
“We’re working on it.”
“We? Who’s we?”
“Just lie low, like I said. You keep your phone charged and I’ll keep you updated, and if we’re lucky, you can write a story about this one day.”
“You don’t tell me what to do, intern,” Lela says. “I tell you what to do.”
To this he has no response.
“You wouldn’t know fuck all if not for me,” she says. “I’m the one who clued you in to what’s going on.”
A voice sounds in the background, and he muffles the receiver and says something in response. Then he returns to her. “I’ve got to go. We’re busy.”
“I know who you’re with,” she says. “I know who we is. It’s that friend you mentioned before, isn’t it? The one who told you all that stuff about the Dark Net? The hacker? The computer nerd?”
There is a long silence. A pop of static. His voice is muffled as though he just crushed his face into the pillow. “Geek,” Josh says. “He prefers geek.”
“I need to talk to him.”
His sigh has a squeak running through it. “He’s not going to talk to you.”
“Just ask him.”
“He hates reporters. He threatened to unfriend me on Facebook for interning at the paper.”
“Let me talk to him. I can be very convincing.”
“I’m telling you, he won’t. He’s super paranoid. All cloak-and-dagger.”
“He needs to make an exception.”
“He won’t.”
She doesn’t know whether she should regret what she says next: “He will when he hears about my niece.”
“Your what? Niece? What about her?”
“She’s been on the Dark Net.”
“She and a half million others.”
“No. You don’t understand. I don’t even understand. But she’s been there. There’s no simple way to explain this over the phone except to say she can navigate it like nobody else. But she needs your help to get there safely. Now. She knows where to find these guys. She can stop them.” Lela almost says, “Or so she claims,” but doesn’t.
Lela has been circling the dining room as she speaks, with Hannah trailing a few feet behind her. Now her niece nods eagerly and bunches her hands below her chin and rises onto her tiptoes hopefully, still a kid after all. Lela remembers what her sister once said to her. Once you become a parent, your sense of self is compromised. Because the child is you, an extension of you, like a third hand, an extra spleen. But you don’t control it—it won’t listen—even when you try to keep it from harm’s way. Every time your kid approaches a cliff-side, a busy intersection, a strange dog, you feel a gut-twisting anxiety, a projective sensation the childless can only distantly understand. Her sister said that a lot. “You wouldn’t understand, since you don’t have a kid.”
Maybe she was right. Until now. Is she an aunt or a mother? Either way, Hannah is her blood. Suggesting the girl go on the Dark Net feels like shoving her fork-first into a light socket. “She can help,” Lela says, her throat dry. “Now tell us where you are. We’re coming.”